


Hawaiian Punch

by maypop



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-15 07:24:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/524681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maypop/pseuds/maypop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Feferi Peixes, continually bulgeblocked by species diversity. A short fic in a Non-Sgrub AU setting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hawaiian Punch

“Faaaaaaaace it,” Vriska drawls. “You don’t know anything about real trolls! Even the people on your side aren’t on your stupid side, they just want a good war. You want to rule us like your stupid bottlefish—”  
  
“Cuttlefish,” you spit, and you could hate her in that second. In that second, sprawly and showing off her dentition with the joy of spitting on your dream—it’s worse than disagreeing with you, it’s laughing at you, how cute your rage is! You want to teach her lips the shape of your rings, in that second, until she picks up your trident.  
  
At twenty three sweeps it’s not gold anymore, it’s a ship-piercer alloy plated in yellow, and you can see her arm shake with strain as she tries to hold it steady enough to check her lipstick in it, before throwing it down in disgust.  
  
“God, what is that, did you actually get a spear made out of your own self importance?”  
  
You lean down and pick up your trident, carefully lean it against the wall again.  
  
You are Feferi Peixes, twenty-three sweeps will you live to see twenty-four, and you are… different. You remember now, with your hatred congealing into tiredness:  
  
The blood forced out to your extremities is so turgid and cold that the great convulsive thumps of your heart would crack a lowblood’s ribs. You have been wearing contact lenses for sweeps now, because your generals will likely all be dead before a capillary in your deepwater eyes can be induced to pop, and the yellow shine of your youth doesn’t help your cause. You take less damage in the vacuum, your teeth cut your words into different shapes, and you don’t quite understand the feeling of “cold.”  
  
You are never, ever, ever going to blend in with your subjects, not ever again. Until the day you die, glasses and bulkheads and the shivering surface of ground stewed wake-up beans will show you the face of the Empire.  
  
“Cod, Vriska, just get out,” you say.  
  
When she’s gone, after copious assurances she was leaving anyway, and dramatic pauses in places the light flattered her, you turn the water on. It’s an expensive and heavy luxury on a spaceship. You used to care about that, probably. More and more lately you reach that thin place where you can’t bear playing landdweller. Not just in the big things, like their awful two dimensional sense of space, and their round, insensitive ears, but the little things, like gill jokes.  
  
(Equius had taught himself a few gill sounds, back when you’d hoped there was hope for you and mutant-strong Equius, and you had ruined everything by laughing yourself sick. It had just been so _incongruous_.)  
  
“Computer,” this one doesn’t have a name, the funds you poured into finding a way to use dead psionic brains had been well spent, though tonight you are lonely and self pitying enough to remember when ships said _yes, princess_ _?_ in a _real_ voice. “Computer, show me the Condescension.”  
  
Your face with different eyes clicks into being on the opposite wall. You float closer.  
  
So Eridan finds you, when he arrives, some uncounted time later.  
  
“I found a thing,” is what he opens with. He still doesn’t swim as well as he should, and you could hate him for that, but—no. It does make you impatient, as he kicks himself over to you. You know you’re being unreasonable when you snatch his found thing away irritably.  
  
It’s a book. “‘Somefin for heiresses to look at themselves in’,” you read. The pun has been transcribed, making you feel a little more charitable towards a universe that had good jokes in it. “Is it good?”  
  
“Well,” Eridan says. “Well uh. The romance part’s definitely worth a peak.”  
  
The Condescension’s image is large enough to turn the light fuchsia and gold, making you squint a little at the print.  
  
“It’s telling me to pity my people and hate their enemies, same as everyfin else,” you say, after a few minutes leafing, and then you turn the page to reveal, delineated in carefully watersealed gold leaf, a nook in a color that troll programming languages call #7R3450N.  
  
“Oh,” you say, slapping it closed. “Um.”  You blush, wishing your skin stayed as grey as your eyes stayed yellow. “Eridan! You read this?”  
  
“This is the only copy,” he says quickly. “An’ it’s. An’ it’s.”  
  
“Sneaky porn! Sneaky, expensive porn!”  
  
Eridan, caught between you and the floating grin of empress, has nowhere safe to look. He’d be sweating on land. “It says there’s one troll out there you can’t destroy an’ if you can good riddance!”  
  
The thought trickles and bursts in your head like a stream of bubbles.  
  
You both turn in place, to stare at the troll who you have devoted your life, and the life of everyone you know, really, to destroying.  
  
“An’ that explains why so few get born,” Eridan gabbles on. “It’s not a mutation, like we thought it might be—”  
  
“Thanks,” you say, but you aren’t really listening anymore. The bubbles are popping in your head, and you feel foolish for not getting it faster. You were born into everything else that’s ever plagued you, of course you were born into this too.  
  
“I want to send a message to Battleship Condescension,” you say, over the surf-pounding in your ears.  
  
“Is that… a good idea, Fef…”  
  
“Probably not!” you say. “But it is an order.”  
  
You are Feferi Peixes, undisputed, cloud foretold heiress to a broken universe, and there is a true hate in you.


End file.
